It is well-known in the precast products field, commonly called gabions, for the construction of walls, retaining walls, barricades, decorative stone fences, noise-reduction barriers used particularly by landscape gardeners, and noise-reduction barriers in the track noise barriers' field or the like.
These gabions generally occur in panels consisting of metal meshes, constituting the vertical walls, the base and the lid, wherein said gabions are assembled one to another by means of metal spirals. These gabions usually have a significantly parallelepiped shape; however, they can have an ordinary shape. These gabions are usually built and filled with filler material such as pebbles, natural rock fragments, etc. . . . on site where they are used. They can also be pre-mounted and filled with embankments on a building site and then be transported to the place of use. The size of the backfilled materials exceeds the size of the mesh panels.
Incidentally, these gabions include a geotextile fabric positioned on the inner side of the mesh panels in order to allow the use of backfilled materials, whose size is smaller than the size of the metal mesh panels, but exceeds the size of the meshes of the geotextile fabric.
Such gabions are described in particular in the French patent FR 788 004. The gabion usually has a significantly parallelepiped shape and includes a metal mesh reinforcement to which the desired shape is obtained by a folding mechanism. The inner side of the reinforcement in metal meshes is topped with fillings, such as a fencing reed for example, capable of preventing the transfer of materials through the meshes of the iron lattice that are smaller than these meshes. Furthermore, other similar gabions are described in the French patent applications FR 2 862 670, FR 2 907 480 and FR 2 917 104, in the English patent application GB 2 334 739, in the European patent application EP 0 197 000, in the German patent application DE 4032966 and in the International patent applications WO 9633314 and WO 9012160.
The document US 2008/0264546 also describes a gabion including panels consisting of metal meshes assembled two by two, by welding, in order to form a casing for receiving a bulk of filtering and/or decontamination materials such as clean sediments, thin silt, sand and weighting materials like natural rock fragments and/or pebbles. The gabion includes a parallelepiped pouch obtained with geotextile fabric, a permeable fabric, in which are positioned the filtering and weighting materials. Preferably, the geotextile fabric contains reactive materials in order to capture pollutants.
The assembly of this type of gabion particularly long, places considerable strain on the construction costs of civil works executions that use these gabions.
In order to address these drawbacks, pre-assembled gabions providing a fast set up have already been imagined. It is the case for example concerning the gabions described in the American patents U.S. Pat. No. 5,333,970 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,472,297. Such gabions are made of building sites panels in open wire mesh connected edge-to-edge that can rotate and folded one on the other just like concertina. The side walls are connected by board panels, knowing that side walls are able to rotate relative to the board panels. The gabions thus form an adapted structure to be mounted on a building site by deploying it with a flexible rope to ensure that the deployed structure forms a series of gabions fit to be filled with filler materials. Favourably, the gabions contain a geotextile fabric secured on the inner side of the panels in order to allow a filling with a material whose size is smaller than the size of the panels meshes.
This kind of gabion structure has the disadvantage, besides being particularly expensive due to the complexity of the assembly, of not giving a sufficient modularity to execute civil works.